Like a walk through six million years of evolutionary history, Edmund Blair Bolles demonstrates how members of the human lineage came to speak. Beginning with a diorama of the last common ancestor ignoring a bird as it flies by, he guides readers through generations, illuminating how it became possible for two Homo sapiens not only to acknowledge the songbird, but also to discuss the meaning of its song. Tracing the rise of voluntary vocalizations as well as the first words, phrases, and sentences, Bolles works against the common belief that apes cannot speak because they are not smart enough. In this groundbreaking work, Bolles introduces a new paradigm for the origin of language and how the human mind works.